Computers

Dirty Data

preterite Computers, Writing

Cameron Marlow, a PhD candidate at the MIT media lab, has put together a survey about weblogs to further his dissertation research, and it looks like a lot of folks I know have filled it out. As a fellow dissertator, I was glad to be able to help him out, and I think the project is a great idea. (From his links, he’s also doing all sorts of other cool stuff, as well.) However, I’ve got to say I found myself a little frustrated with the limits set by his questions in my attempts to respond to his survey. The MIT media lab, I think, could use a research methods seminar.

The survey’s minor infelicities — it asks if you met your family online; there’s no selection for “colleague” when it asks how you know someone; it requests occupational data in categories that reveal more about the author than about possible respondents — don’t take away from its value. More problematic, though, are the ways it frames the crawl it does on your blog: upon finding 'a href' tags (er, including in my case a link to an explanation of the 'rel' attribute that may have been helpful to Marlow), it asks you to classify the link, offering these options: weblog, weblog entry/post, personal homepage, part of my weblog, other. Are these really the only sorts of pages to which webloggers link? (I’ve heard a number of qualitative researchers observe that “other” often tends to get a whoooole lot of responses.) Actually, though, this may have been a really smart reason for Marlow’s limiting of the form’s options — but I fear he might have sacrificed research accuracy for research efficiency. As one commenter observed, it’s also troubling to see what the survey’s list of transactional motivations for blogging doesn’t include: learning isn’t on there, for example. Nor is the pleasure of writing.

Like I said, the project seems important, smart, and well-intentioned — but I also worry it’ll likely return some problematically dirty data.

CW05: Materializing Resistance

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Computers, Economics, Writing

Apologies for taking so long to put up my last panel notes — kind of got a whole bunch of different things going on right now. I was also kind of anxious because, to be honest, it was one of the best panels I saw; Jim Ridolfo and David Sheridan and Tony Michel fit their presentations together really well thematically speaking; but I also liked it because I saw so much in it that intersected with my research interests and offered me some new and startling insights. All three focused, in one way or another, with the intersection of multimodal discourses with the discourse of the civic, as their panel’s subtitle (“Digital Rhetoric as a Civic Technology”) might demonstrate, but all three were very careful to acknowledge a sophisticated awareness of the many problems associated with the privileging of civic discourse, which made me happy — one so rarely sees, in our field, an acknowledgement that the public sphere was initially theorized as a bourgeois space.

Jim’s presentation, “Rhetorical Veloooocity!!!: The Economics of the Press Advisory and Tactics of Activist Delivery,” dealt with his work at Michigan State with the Worker Rights Consortium, composing activist press advisories with the knowledge and intent that the language of those advisories may be appropriated by the press. Basically, using the example of the sequence of rhetorical production and circulation of these releases, Jim demonstrated the deep connections between rhetorical delivery, re-seen economic theories — of production, distribution, consumption, appropriation, and re-production — and activist strategies for economic change. In fact, Jim argued, the rhetorical canon of delivery can be theorized through the lens of economy, including — in particular — the rhetorical situations in which the mass delivery, redistribution and re-appropriation of writings are the rhetorical objective. In the context of distribution defined as a tactic of delivery planned for economic circulation, Jim’s term “rhetorical velocity” refers to an accelerated delivery tactic (or cycle?) fostering the appropration of texts. He offered the example of a “News Advisory” sent to local papers concerning a protest event that used the words “students will dance vigorously”: two newspapers that actually sent reporters did not use those words, but the paper that did not send a reporter — only a photographer — described the event as “vigorous dancing,” and offered no reporter’s name on the news piece that ran following the event. Jim then showed a timeline demonstrating how quickly that cycle of appropriation operated: press release on Tuesday, event on Thursday, the appropriated-language news piece on Friday. In his conclusions, Jim compared the activist economy, the economy of the reporter, and the economy of media, all on immediate, near, and long-term scales, and noted that these three economies overlap in the ways different parties construct the economic value of a distributed text. Brilliant stuff, and this too-brief description doesn’t do it justice.

David Sheridan’s presentation on “Materializing Ethics and Multimodal Civic Rhetoric” described how different forms of production and semiotic affordances can open up shifting civic opportunities, working from the perspectives of the different but intersecting axes of understanding rhetoric as a material practice and rhetoric as an ethical practice. (And I know that sentence is a huge, mangled tangle of David’s language; I’m hoping he’ll set me straight.) In other words: how do material considerations intersect with rhetorical ethics?

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CW05: Copyright Anxiety

preterite Composition Theory, Computers, Economics, Openness, Politics, Writing

Dánielle Nicole DeVoss, Nancy Allen, and Stephanie Vie gave a presentation titled “Copy-Right Anxiety: File Distribution and Intellectual Property,” and I’m not sure what the hyphenation means — maybe foregrounding the question of whether it’s ethical or right to copy? I didn’t hear them explain it, but that certainly didn’t detract from the quality of their presentations. Dánielle’s focused on using examples of video pastiche to theorize some implications of new media convergence, while Nancy’s had a deeply pedagogical focus on the implications of open source practices for the classroom, and Stephanie’s examined the intersection of students’ attitudes about peer-to-peer file-sharing and their attitudes about plagiarism; the three, taken together, sparked a lively discussion and composed a sort of collective matrix of insight about the nature of intellectual property online.

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CW05: The Politics of Digital Literacy

preterite Class (Economic), Composition Pedagogy, Computers, Economics, Politics

Casey and I got our presentations out of the way (the bare-bones version of mine is here: I had the rather stressful experience of a kernel panic and hard crash the night before while I was trying to put together some accompanying PowerPoint slides), and we’re happy to have that done. We got lots of insightful comments from generous respondents, and I hope our presentations have enough in common that we’ll be able to smush them together into something publishable.

Anyway: what I want to talk about here is the really impressive first panel I went to, on “The Politics of Digital Literacy: Cases for Institutional Critique,” since Kris Blair, Mary Hocks, and Michelle Comstock all gave enviably smart and well-put-together talks that intersected in productive and provocative ways, especially in that — while sharing a common theme and associations with large, diverse urban or state universities — Mary’s focused on institutional concerns, Michelle’s on community concerns, and Kris’s on personal concerns.

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CW 2005: Drupal Workshop

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Computers, Writing

This isn’t a review of the excellent all-day session on using Drupal as a writing course community content management system, but just a way to say thanks to Charlie Lowe, Jim Kalmbach, Bradley Bleck, and Tim Lindgren (as well as some helpful long-distance commentary from Samantha Blackmon and Clancy Ratliff) for a great workshop. Kieran Lal assisted as well with some tutoring and a short and impressive presentation on CivicSpace, the reincarnation (?) of the DeanSpace distributed open source content management system designed specifically for the needs of a grassroots political campaign. I learned lots and lots and lots today — my brain hurts — and I’m looking forward to trying out some of Drupal’s way-beyond-just-blogging capabilities with my students in the fall.

My presentation’s tomorrow morning. (And, uh, I could still really use some help with a title.)

The Mask of Altruism

preterite Composition Theory, Computers, Economics

According to Elspeth Stuckey, “The current high profile of literacy is symptomatic of a speedy, ruthless transition from an industrial to an information-based economy. This economic shift accentuates literacy’s role in economic growth, class structure, and social estrangement. Literacy, to be sure, is a powerful, unique technology. Yet literacy remains a human invention contained by social contract, and the maintenance of that contract in education betrays our ideas of humanity as surely as our use of literacy enforces them. Are we helping those in need of economic and social opportunity, or those (including ourselves) who wish to maintain their own economic and social advantage?” (Violence viii). This was largely the point of my post yesterday: the mask of altruism worn by many folks in the field of computers and writing is nothing more than a mask. Indeed, some highly respected scholars have gone so far as to say, essentially, “Fuck the poor.”

I’m not writing to them. I know I don’t stand a chance of ever changing their minds: we’ve all seen how institutional comfort can harden overnight into conservatism. But in light of such conservatism, consider Stuckey’s quotation of Henry Giroux’s acknowledgement that in public debate, “the issue of literacy has been removed from the broader social, historical, and ideological forces that constitute its existence” (Stuckey 52). I would argue that those who advocate an engagement with digital literacies on their own terms, apart from the social and the material (again, see yesterday’s post), are attempting a similar remove. So why is this important? Because this remove is exactly the same move that J. K. Gibson-Graham describes in the discourse of economics, a shift “from an understanding of the economy as something that can be managed (by people, the state, the IMF) to something that governs society” via “a hegemonic move through which representations of economy have slipped from their locations in discourse and landed ‘on the ground,’ in the ‘real,’ not just separate from, but outside of society” (1).

It’s learned helplessness in the service of political, economic, and pedagogical conservatism. And I’d hope that any good teacher might ask that her students turn their faces not to the past, but to the future: to possibility, and to the hope of a more egalitarian society, where those in positions of privilege work to help the disenfranchised, rather than exclude them.

The Worthless Slave

preterite Class (Cultural), Class (Economic), Composition Theory, Computers

Elspeth Stuckey, in The Violence of Literacy, notes that “literacy legitimates itself. To be literate is to be legitimate; not to be literate is to beg the question. The question is whether or not literacy possesses powers unlike other technologies. The only way to answer the question is to be literate. What more effective form of abuse than to offer clandestine services” (18). This, to me, is the single most devastating critique of the ideology that technology is destiny, whether that technology be literacy or computers.

Understand: computers do nothing on their own. Marcuse and Feenberg remind us that technologies can never be isolated from the uses to which they are put, nor from the material and embodied conditions under which they are used. As such, computers are never outside of society, and their uses and effects never transcend the materiality of the everyday life of society, of its individuals and its classes. And so the refusal to discuss issues of access to computer technologies in conjunction with — no, not prior to or instead of — issues of the ideologies and uses and effects of computer technologies is a way of declaring those technologies neutral, transcendent, beyond intervention, and in need of no critical consideration. As Elspeth Stuckey and Cynthia Selfe demonstrate, such refusal discursively turns the technology — literacy, computers — into a tool of domination. Those granted technological access are blessed, and those so blessed take upon themselves the role of gatekeepers, declaring the poor preterite hopelessly damned, cast into the outer dark where we might hope to not hear their wailing and gnashing of teeth: “For to everyone who has, more shall be given, and he will have an abundance” (Matthew 25:29).

Those who make public arguments about technologies — literacy, computers — are almost always those who have in some way mastered those technologies. They are, therefore, also those who have the most to gain from those technologies. Given such a circumstance — given that we who write about such things are the ones who tend to benefit from them — one might suppose it wise to attempt to see beyond our own noses.

I’ve seen a common thread in much of composition’s published work on class, from academics writing about the working conditions of academics to the self-admittedly middle-class Lynn Bloom singing the praises of the middle class to Julie Lindquist’s claim of a working-class background as partial rationale for her research on working-class rhetorics. The common thread is that, as far as class goes, much of the literature is compositionists talking in some way about themselves. Now: what happens when we shift the topic to computer technologies?

I’m sure I don’t have to give the answer: it’s obvious from Stuckey’s remarks. But for those who might need a broader hint, consider Linda Brodkey’s characterization of the “class narcissism that sees itself everywhere it looks” (“On the Subjects,” College English 51.2, February 1989). The essay as a whole is well worth a read for its thoughts on the ways in which such narcissism constitutes a blindly and blithely vicious form of domination.

Personal Branding

preterite Class (Meta), Composition Pedagogy, Computers, Economics, Metadissertating, Writing

I’ve had this idea I’ve been working at from different angles for a few weeks; an idea that feels like the germ of the idea that’s at the heart of my dissertation’s final chapter. In Chapter 1, I argue that the discipline of composition has a really difficult time talking explicitly about economic issues, and that teaching writing with computers is one of the big places in composition that makes economic inequality really, really visible. So I go through chapters on class and economics, and come back to the economics of computers and composition at the end, where I talk about how open source perspectives can help to de-fang the effects of economic commodification in the writing classroom. But I haven’t been able to connect those issues all that well to class, until lately, especially with some prodding from a colleague over dinner tonight.

At Wealth Bondage, CEO Candidia Cruikshanks rages that The Happy Tutor is trying to steal her “brand equity” — said equity, of course, embodied in all that attitude and oh my those boots. Naomi Klein recently argued elsewhere (can’t find the link now — help me out?) that personal identity is itself an act of branding. And I’ve argued that class is the point of articulation between economics and identity. What I’ve neglected to investigate, in my considerations of the (economic?) use value of personal writing, are the ways in which identity/self/persona in and of itself, as enacted in writing, takes on both commodified and non-commodified (market and non-market; monetized and non-monetized) economic value. At Wealth Bondage — perhaps as nowhere else — we see personae qua personae ventured, offered, exchanged, and rejected in market, feudal, slave, and gift transactions. So — rhetoricians, compositionists, bloggers — what are the values of the personal selves you compose and enact on your weblogs? Some of those values are easily commodified: technorati, blogshares, comments; promotion, hiring, tenure. So, too, for students: my professor tells me this weblog entry is worth a C minus. But what about those other types of economic transactions; the non-commodified ones?

And how might those non-commodified values shift when we move from considering the various blog personae of teachers to considering the various blog personae of students?

Two Takes

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Computers

Doc Searls’ closing keynote at Les Blogs says some interesting things about weblogs and the production of writing — things that for me intersect in curious ways with an essay by John Udell on “The New Freshman Comp” that Collin recently had a lot of smart things to say about. One concern with Udell’s piece, though: Udell argues convincingly that good programmers need to be good writers. (This actually is hardly as suprising as Udell makes it out to be: that’s why we call it writing code.) However, Udell concludes by proposing a non sequitur: the “methods” he describes as being used by programmers — i.e, “screencasting” — should therefore “be a part of the new freshman comp.”

No. Logically, that simply does not follow. I’m much more inclined to buy Jeff Rice’s argument that shifts in technology are producing shifts in consciousness, and that we need to take these shifts into account in our teaching, than I am to buy Udell’s conclusion. (Although I’ll say that Jeff’s argument still feels, for me, uncomfortably close to the technology-is-destiny position of a substantive theory of technology that Andrew Feenberg traces in the work of Jacques Ellul and Martin Heidegger.) Still, Collin’s essay (much more than Udell’s) has got me thinking about the points Doc Searls makes about producing texts, and Doc Searls’ Paris keynote has got me wishing that more of the jet-setting tech folks like Searls would pay attention to arguments like Collin’s and start working on understanding and engaging with the work my discipline’s doing — rather than merely invoking it, as Udell does.